NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 52

STORM SEASON
AN NFPA JOURNAL SPECIAL REPORT

THE FLOODING
FROM HURRICANE
HARVEY WAS BAD FOR
many residents of Crosby, Texas, about 25 miles northeast
of Houston. Then came another calamity: residents living
within a mile-and-a-half radius of the Arkema chemical
manufacturing plant located in the town were told to leave
their homes before fires at the facility began spewing noxious
smoke. Fear and uncertainty marked the early days of the
incident. "[The company] made it sound like it was blowing
up," one evacuee told a local radio station.
According to the Washington Post, Arkema, a French company that manufactures organic peroxides at the Crosby site,
anticipated main power loss during the storm and moved its
chemicals, which need to be cooled to remain stable, to containers refrigerated by diesel-powered generators. But when
six-foot floodwaters washed over the site, the generators
failed, too. The containers began warming, and on August 31,
about a week after Harvey first made landfall, the chemicals
began to spontaneously combust. Arkema North America
CEO Richard Rowe conceded that the weather conditions
caught the company off-guard. "I apologize, we apologize," he
said, according to media accounts. "No one anticipated we'd
be looking at a site with six feet of water on it."
Questions remain, including details of procedures that
were in place to address flooding at the plant. Two lawsuits
have been filed against Arkema-one by police officers
and emergency medical technicians, who say they suffered
respiratory irritation as a result of the fires, and another by
Harris County, which includes Crosby and Houston, alleging
Arkema should have been more proactive in addressing the
incident. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is currently
investigating the incident.
The Arkema incident speaks to a larger problem illustrated
by Harvey: much of the United States' chemical industry

52 | NFPA JOURNAL * N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 7

is concentrated along the Gulf Coast, directly in the path
of some of nature's most powerful and destructive storms.
Experts point out that codes like NFPA 400, Hazardous
Materials Code, could be amended to better address these
natural hazards and help the industry protect itself against
these threats, thereby preventing future incidents like
Arkema.

DOZENS OF FAILURES
Arkema was far from the only chemical industry failure to
occur during Harvey, which isn't surprising considering
petroleum runs through the veins of Houston. Major oil companies like Shell and Phillips 66 call the city home.
An Associated Press analysis of pollution reports submitted to state and federal regulators found that more than two
dozen petrochemical storage tanks ruptured or failed when
Harvey hit the Texas coast, spilling at
NFPA.ORG/
least 145,000 gallons of fuel and releasSTORMSEASON
ing toxins into the air. Residents told
Read more about
NFPA 1600.
media that the pollution was palpable.
Read more about "You start to get headaches, your eyes
NFPA 400.
start itching, your throat gets scratchy,"
one Houston resident told The Guardian. Twitter users complained of an "unbearable" chemical smell lingering over
parts of Houston.
Based on media reports alone, there was a spike in
incidents involving the chemical industry during Harvey
compared to floods and other weather events the area has
seen in the past 10 or 15 years, said Ed Cope, a fire protection engineer from Houston. Cope runs a code consulting
business that deals primarily with hazardous materials and
serves on the technical committee for NFPA 400. "It seems

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - November/December 2017